1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the computer field, particularly to the field of application sharing, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for restoring an occluded window in application sharing.
2. Description of Related Art
Screen sharing is a very important tool in today's collaborative work environments, especially when we have a virtual team and the team members are located in different places. However, due to security or privacy considerations, people seldom elect to share the whole screen, but just share specific applications. Application sharing enables two or more users to work simultaneously and interactively on the same application. In such application sharing, an application is loaded and runs on a computer, and application sharing software allows a window of the application to be displayed on the screen of a remote computer and enables the application to receive operations from a user on the remote computer (client).
Unfortunately, the window of another unshared application often partially covers that of the application being shared. Thus, the occluded part of the application window will not be transferred to the client user, thus bringing inconvenience to the client user. The scenario becomes more severe when the shared application has a dynamic window. The client user will lose a lot of detailed information of the shared application. FIG. 1 shows an example of Microsoft NetMeeting application sharing, in which the occluded part is shown as a mosaic on the computer of the client computer.
There is not yet a good solution to the problem in the art. Most current products such as Microsoft NetMeeting and IBM Lotus Web Conference simply do not display the occluded part. U.S. Pat. No. 5,758,110, entitled “Apparatus and method for application sharing in a graphic user interface”, discloses a method for implementing application sharing software, in which is disclosed detecting whether a shared application window is occluded by a unshared application window, and in which, however, the occluded part is also just simply put in a shadow.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,266, entitled “Processing Occluded Windows During Application Sharing”, proposes a solution to the problem, wherein if the occluded part of the shared application window is less than 30%, then the data of the occluded part are obtained from the latest displayed data; and, if the occluded part of the shared application window is more than 30%, then the method will wait to receive new window information with the occluded part less than 30% within a certain period of time, and if the new window still has an occluded part greater than 30% in the period of time, then a whole window will be constructed from the display data of the most recent window whose occluded part is less than 30%. Obviously, the method is a very imperfect approximate method, since the occluded part from the previous display data may have changed, thus being incapable of representing the current occluded part correctly.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,570,590, entitled “Application sharing in Frame”, discloses a method for sharing an application in a visual window (frame). The patent does not relate to window overlapping, and any window entering the shared frame will be transferred to the remote collaborative user.